Make a Stacked Bar Chart Online with Plotly and Excel

Bar Charts with Plotly

Step 1

Upload your Excel data to Plotly's grid

Open the data file for this tutorial in Excel. You can download the file here in CSV format

Step 2

Head to Plotly

Head to Plotly's Workspace and sign into your free Plotly account. Go to 'Import', click 'Upload a file', then choose your Excel file to upload. Your Excel file will now open in Plotly's grid. For more about Plotly's grid, see this tutorial

Creating the Chart

Select the x and y axis as shown in the figure below, and then click on the 'Bar Chart' button to create the plot

This will create a raw chart as shown below.

To create a stacked bar chart, from the 'Traces' popover, go to 'mode' tab, and select 'stack', as shown in figure.

Step 4

Styling of the Chart

First, we will edit the bar colors. For this, go to 'Traces' popover, and select the trace you wish to edit. Then, in the 'style' tab, select the suitable marker color.

To Change the background color, click on 'Layout' popover, and select suitable 'Plot Color' from the general tab.

Step 5

Export & Share

The final chart should look like the one below.

Download an image of your Plotly graph by clicking EXPORT on the toolbar.

To add the chart inside an excel sheet, click where you want to insert the picture inside Excel. On the INSERT tab inside Excel, in the ILLUSTRATIONS group, click PICTURE. Locate the Plotly graph image that you downloaded and then double-click it. Notice that we also copy-pasted the Plotly graph link in a cell for easy access to the interactive Plotly version.